Just fix this addiction, but leave the rest of my life alone!

People who want to recover from addiction often face the same roadblock that sabotages other kinds of emotional healing — and many kinds of physical healing:

wanting to fix one’s problem without changing one’s life

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We want to “fix” what we see as an isolated issue without getting at the real problem, which is deeper, and encompasses many facets of our lives. Not realizing how deeply rooted addiction is, we seek solutions that don’t involve drastic and multifaceted change in our lives.

People often come into the recovery process essentially asking: “Help me fix my problem, but don’t ask me to change other parts of my life. Leave the bulk of my life alone, and just take care of this addiction.” As if addiction is an isolated thing, and can be changed by small, isolated interventions!

A medical analogy

To use a medical analogy, we want to fix our addiction problem like we imagine we can fix a medical problem: taking a pill or getting a shot — without changing how we live our lives. The reality is that even with many physical problems, this won’t work. The physical intervention of medication won’t last, and if the person continues their unhealthy lifestyle, the problem (disease) will come back.

This happens in recovery from addiction all the time. And unfortunately, it also happens in recovery from physical problems too.

Take the person who has a very unhealthy diet, gets no exercise, and lives with chronic overwork and stress. They have a heart attack, and have surgery to repair a bad heart valve. They’ve “fixed” the problem, right? But you know what happens next. They go home from the hospital, continue with the same diet, no-exercise, and high-stress lifestyle, and in a matter of months they have more heart trouble.

Healing childhood trauma and heart surgery

This is the concern I have when people come to recovery who over-focus on healing from childhood trauma as the magic fix. They see the diagnosis and “healing” of this early life trauma as the equivalent to heart surgery that will fix their problem.

Please don’t misunderstand me here: I’m not trying to dismiss this important aspect of recovery. Do I believe that healing from early life trauma is essential for recovery from addiction (and also for happy living)? Absolutely. Do I think it’s sufficient for lasting recovery? Absolutely not.

If our lives aren’t working — if we have unresolved spiritual/existential issues, if we’re in jobs that are overly stressful and/or unfulfilling, if we’re isolated and lonely, if our intimate relationships are filled with hatred, abuse, apathy, or neglect, if we’re living in perpetual financial crisis, etc., etc, — we will not find lasting recovery. I guarantee it. We will be like the guy who gets heart surgery and goes back to his old life and terrible habits. The problem will come back.

Then who can recover?

Maybe at this point you’re thinking: “Well then, I guess I can’t recover. My marriage and family life are in shambles. My spouse hates me because of the things I’ve done.” or maybe: “I can’t recover then, because I lost my job and now I’m working in a crummy job that I hate.” or “I can’t recover, because my spouse divorced me and now I’m living in a little apartment, and I’m super lonely.”

Addiction will bring all kinds of chaos and pain into our lives. Much of this chaos and pain comes into our lives as direct consequences from our behaviors. Some of this chaos and pain comes into our lives for no discernable reason other than that we live in a fallen world. Bad things will happen. We will face aspects of our lives that aren’t working.

But here is the point: Our recovery has to involve facing all these areas our lives, and working to fix the ones that aren’t working. Recovery has to involve dealing with the variety of aspects of our lives … because if we are addicted to something, it is certain that there are a variety of things in our lives that are not working. Often we don’t realize this in early recovery, because our addiction is distracting us and numbing our pain.

Gerhard Adler on magical thinking in therapy

Listen to what psychologist Gerhard Adler says about this in his book “Studies in Analytical Psychology”:

It happens only too often that the patient expects at the beginning of an analysis that the psychotherapist will, by some magical means, simply rid him of his symptoms without ever touching the rest of the structure of his life, with which he is quite satisfied. The analyst is only too often supposed to be a kind of ‘medicine man’ who will make the symptoms disappear from the outside.

The truth is that nobody can be cured unless he is prepared to accept the need for a more or less complete reorientation of his life. To put it in a nutshell: the healed person is not the original person minus a symptom, but a newly oriented person in whom, through the new orientation, the necessity for the symptom itself has disappeared.

I’ve often said in workshops and talks I give about recovery that if we are in full-blown addiction, we will not find lasting recovery unless we are willing to do a major overhaul on all the aspects of our lives. Work, church, friendships, hobbies, things we read, how we parent, what we read, where we live … everything needs to be looked at.

People hate to hear that.

I’m not saying that it all needs to be jettisoned or blown up — the “change” might be in how we function in that setting, or relationship. We may not change our job (although we might), but we will change how we think about it, and how we do it. We may not sell our home and move to a new community (although we might), but we will change aspects of our home and community life. And so on.

Are you willing to do that? Not right away. Not all at once. But to apply “rigorous honesty” (a term from the Big Book of AA) to all your life, not just your addiction?

What do I need to change?

I was speaking at a recovery conference not long ago, and one of the other speakers was a woman who had decades of sobriety from alcoholism, and now runs a treatment center for women. She put it this way:

What do we need to change if we want recovery?

Just one thing:

Everything.

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If you are struggling with sexual addiction … I invite you to take the Recovery Journey with me for the next 90 Days. The recovery journey is a 90 Day Home Study course designed to give you a deeper understanding of the inner dynamics and spiritual issues of the path towards recovery. (There’s also a program for the partners/spouses of sexual strugglers.) Just click on the link below: